Category Archives: Computers

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Razer DeathAdder Button Swap (Left- to Right-Handed Mouse)

  By Scott • 2016-09-11 , ,
Razer DeathAdder Button Swap

I’m a leftie, but all my life I’ve used right-handed mice in my left hand. I needed to replace my old Microsoft Optical Mouse, and found the DeathAdder Left-Handed Edition. It’s the perfect size and shape for me, but they did the weird thing of switching the left- and right-click buttons. It’s easy enough in most any operating system to swap the buttons in settings. However — at least with Windows — the buttons are only changed locally. So when connecting to other hosts via Remote Desktop the buttons revert to their hardware configuration. That’s a no-go for me, but I liked the mouse so much that I decided to mod the hardware instead. Fortunately, it’s very easy to reconfigure … Continue reading

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Choosing a Disk Drive: HDDs, SSDs, and Then Some

Video

  By Scott • 2016-06-09 ,

This video covers almost everything you need to know about HDDs and SSDs to make an educated choice before pulling the trigger on a purchase.

Well, almost everything. This video is primarily directed at the home user trying to get some additional storage, whether that be an extra drive in their workstation, a NAS, or a full file server. If you’re trying to choose between SAS drives for a large-scale datacenter installation, then you probably know this stuff already.

As I promised in the video, here’s some links to my HDD TCO worksheet from 2013 (though I may have updated it in the interim with a couple of “new” drives). Please download the Excel version and use this for any drive that you want. If you make any interesting changes or large scale updates, I’d love to see it, so please let me know!

I also added a bunch of notes so you know what I meant with all the field names.

HDD Total Cost of Ownership Worksheet (Google Sheets – View only)

HDD Total Cost of Ownership Worksheet (Excel – View and edit)

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Let’s Open: Intel Mini PC G2 (from AliExpress)

Video

  By Scott • 2016-04-24 , ,

This video features a review and teardown of the Intel Mini PC G2 manufactured by — uhhh — Random Chinese Company 5000.

Did it ship with tons of bloatware and malware? Is it too good to be true that it comes with a full copy of Windows 10? Are the specs worth a damn in the real world? Watch me ramble on about it to find out!

If you want to buy this cylindrical masterpiece mediocrity, a link to the original AliExpress listing is below (which may be way out of date by the time you read this). Note that this is not an endorsement and I don’t receive one penny if you do end up buying it.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/In-stock-High-Quality-Windows-10-MINI-PC-Host-32G-Memory-Bay-Trail-CR-2-4G/32596403800.html

Not every product from China is crap, but in the “Let’s Open” series I’m buying stuff that seems really good on paper, but has a whiff of the toilet about it.

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FreeNAS Fibre Channel LUN Error / Timeout

  By Scott • 2016-02-28
FreeNAS Server - Fibre Connections (Ethernet and FC)

TL;DR I’m a bit long winded, I know. If you’re pulling your hair out, scroll right down to the solution (which of course may or may not match your actual problem). Background I’m posting this because there is very little information on Google regarding these particular error messages, and I’m hoping that this will help point you in the right direction if you’re having the same issue. I have a new FreeNAS server that’s going to be serving my home network via SMB / NFS, but I also wanted to give my dev and production environments access to its main storage pool for non-critical file systems (backup staging, test environments, etc). My TCP/IP networks (home/dev/prod/management) are rigorously firewalled off from … Continue reading

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Sixteen (!) New Batteries for a 3000VA APC UPS

Video

  By Scott • 2016-02-15 ,

I recently got a good deal on a 120V 3000VA APC SURTA3000XL, a 120 pound beast of a double conversion online UPS which boasts over 30 mins of runtime at half load (and that’s still over 1000 Watts)! It didn’t come with batteries, so this video shows the process of “refurbishing” a couple of old modules with new batteries, and testing out the UPS.

The reason I was hunting down reasonably priced DCO UPS wasn’t because I’m especially concerned about poor-quality power from my wall, but because I needed a UPS that would play nice with generator power.

I’d love to be able to afford a couple of ~7500 Watt inverter style generators (one primary and one backup) to run the whole house during a power failure, but the best I can do is a pair of contractor style gensets. They’re noisy and output a mess of voltages and frequencies, but they work. Well, they didn’t work with line interactive UPSes, but they’ll work fine with something like this APC.

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How to Choose the Right “4K” (UHD) Monitor – Featuring the Crossover 404K

Video

  By Scott • 2015-09-14 , , ,

If you want to see a man in a basement ramble on about monitors for over an hour, this is the video for you!

I cover a wide variety of monitor specification-related topics, and how they all come together with the Crossover 404K. But don’t worry, even if the 404K is obsolete by the time you find this, it should still be helpful! (Maybe.)

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Crossover 404K – Unboxing and First Impressions

Video

  By Scott • 2015-07-26 , ,

Here’s Part 1 in a three two part series of videos covering the Crossover 404K and off-brand Korean monitors in general.

It’s nothing fancy, but somehow I spent 20 minutes unboxing this thing. And yes, I did edit it down. So put on your best tray of popcorn, and hold onto nothing at all for this mildly unexciting voyage into a 40 inch “4K” (actually UHD) monitor.

Thanks in advance for watching, and please subscribe to make me feel better about what I’m doing with my life to catch the next videos in the series!

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Digital Juice Sound Effects Library File Renamer

  By Scott • 2015-07-08
digital_juice_by_tappy

What’s this for?? I have some Digital Juice SFX library DVD files from circa 2006 or some such. The DVDs contained tons of small WAV and MP3 files of sound effects, foley and music. They’re meant to be accessed with Digital Juice’s Juicer app, which contains all the metadata. I lost the DVDs a while ago, but had already copied them to my file server. The problem is that I don’t want to use the Juicer app. I have a bunch of other sound libraries, and want to be able to search them all at once. Unfortunately the sound files on the DVDs are all named generically, such as 00293_SFX.wav, which is pretty useless. My savior I did a quick … Continue reading

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DIY Motion Control Camera Slider

  By Scott • 2015-04-24 , ,
Motion Control Slider - YouTube Featured Image 01

Introductory Video This video is and introduction of my motion control slider project, showing the basics of what it can do and how it’s used. Time Lapse Assembly Video I figured that I’d record the entire assembly process of the MC slider from start to finish. This video shows about 24 hours of real time in 15 minutes, and in it I discuss some of the problems I faced and design choices I made. Feedback If you’ve got any comments or random abuse to hurl, please post it here on the ol’ blog. Seriously, I’d appreciate any and all suggestions and I’m happy to answer any questions you might have. As promised in the videos, various downloads and a parts … Continue reading

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Microsoft Web Deploy – Bad Application, or the Worst Application?

  By Scott • 2015-02-24 ,
Down load Microsoft Web Deploy to your toilet today!

Background I’m migrating a bunch of corporate websites hosted on Win2k8 and IIS7 to a new server running exactly the same. I’m sticking with the same environment because there are some things I really don’t want to risk breaking — we just needed faster hardware and more spindles. I figured I’d use MS Web Deploy 3.5 to move all the IIS settings from one server to the other (a task that was gloriously simple in IIS6). Web Deploy adds the following option to the IIS Manager context menus for the server and individual sites: It looks great! Simple and straightforward. Export or import. Indeed it’s a simple interface. I wanted to export everything, so I chose to deploy from the … Continue reading